The
Deadline - is a hassle free method to both administer and render on
Microsoft Windows-based computer clusters of all sizes.

Ben
Houston led the development, marketing and sales of Deadline while at Frantic
Films. Deadline is a ultra-robust render farm management
system. Deadline has been used by Frantic Films on the movies
Paycheck, Scooby Doo 2, Catwoman, X-Men 3, and Superman Returns, by
Blizzard Entertainment on World of Warcraft, and by dozens of other VFX
production houses around the world. Acquired by Amazon in 2017.

Flood is a state-of-the-art level set-based fluid
dynamics simulation system for the high end VFX and CG communities. Ben
Houston led the research and development of the core fluid simulation
technology employed by Flood as well as being responsible for its
overall software architecture.

The RLE
(run-length encoded) sparse level set is a novel scalable level set
representation. This compact level set representation, and it's
ability to represent animated characters, was used in the creation of the
"Tar Monster."

Our
contribution consists of two parts. The first part involves representing
the occlusions via an augmented level setinstead of the usual
polygon based representations. The second aspect of our contribution
consists of a technique called constrained velocity extrapolation,
which uses the occlusions level set representation to better capture the
subtle effects the occlusions have on the behavior of surrounding fluid.
In addition to just more accurate fluid-occlusion interactions the above
techniques allow for our arbitrarily shaped, moving occlusions (such as the
two blue cups belong) to act as containers for the fluid.

This
method has since been adopted by Industrial Light & Magic to animate
the semi-liquid nature of the Terminatrix villain of Terminator 3.

Interned
two summers with Visual Insights (now called Oculus Info) under the
supervision of Bill Wright. Primary task included a general
rewrite of a futuristic and interactive 3d battlefield command and control
project and the subsequent development of features in response to requests
from generals in the US military. This project was a component of DARPA's
Command Post of the Futureinitiative and has subsequently
won numerous awards.

Another
collaboration with Zack Jacobson: A 3D visual front end for the
Autonomy search engine. It features clustering through multiple
queries as well as interactive relevance filtering.

Software Prototype: Robot-3D
Scanner Control System

Written
for Silicon Graphics machines under the supervision of Michael Greenspan.
It's mostly a control system with a little bit of graphics thrown on top.
The program is inoperative without an attached robotic arm.